Segregated Witness Starts Tonight (SegWit) at Block 481,824

Segregated Witness Starts Tonight (SegWit) at Block 481,824

UPDATE 11:30PM CST: On August 23 at approximately 10:00 pm EDT on block 481822 Segregated Witness finally activated and is now live on the Bitcoin network. The mining pool BTC.com processed block 481822 and Segregated Witness was officially activated on the network. We are all waiting to see if it increases transaction throughput and makes fees cheaper over the course of the next few weeks.

The Bitcoin community has been swamped in politics since SegWit was first proposed in 2015 by Bitcoin Core contributor Pieter Wuille as a possible “compromise” to the scaling debate. Peter has been involved with Bitcoin since 2011.

Segregated Witness, or SegWit, is the name used for a proposed soft fork change in the transaction format of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin which has already been implemented on Litecoin . The formal title “Segregated Witness (Consensus layer)” has Bitcoin Improvement Proposals number BIP141.

Segregated witness (SegWit) is a soft fork that, if activated, will allow transaction-producing software to separate (segregate) transaction signatures (witnesses) from the part of the data in a transaction that is covered by the txid.

So what you say? What does this have to do with you?

Segregated Witness, or SegWit as it is commonly known is where data related to signatures (witnesses) are removed from bitcoin transactions making them smaller in size. This in turn makes the blocks smaller meaning more transactions can be included in a block.

This gives the Bitcoin Blockchain the ability to hold more transactions in each block which in turn will make the blockchain faster. Faster confirmation times mean you won’t have to wait hours or days for your Bitcoin transactions to complete. YES! In addition to that, the fees associated with each transaction would theoretically decrease. Another YES!

100% of bitcoin mining pools signalled support for the proposal on August 8th and acording to network data, the block was mined by BitClub Network.

Litecoin activated it last spring with much fanfare which drove the price of LTC upwards.

The Bitcoin network moved into a two-week “grace period,” to give users and mining pools a chance to upgrade their software. After that, which looks to end tonight or tomorrow morning at Block 481,824. Then SegWit will activate and miners will start rejecting blocks that do not support the change.

Technically speaking, SegWit activation brings the following to the table:

It rearranges how data is stored in bitcoin blocks.

It boosts capacity while remaining compatible with past versions of the software.

It removes transaction malleability, a bug that’s been the primary roadblock for many bitcoin projects.

In preparation for this day of SegWit activation, some developers have already built active Lightning Network implementations, and they’re now working to ensure that all of them work with one another.

Since the Lightning Network is now a pissibility on two major cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC), cryptocurrency developers are also planning on using the network to create a new type of trustless trading between the two. It’s also possible that these tools could potentially eliminate the need for cryptocurrency exchanges which have been a thorn on the rear for many cryptocurrency exchange customers.

But the politics and drama are far from over in the community. There is the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) contingency who still believe that SegWit is the wrong approach which is why they took it upon themselves to activate a hard fork (UAHF – User Activated Hard Fork) which created BCH. BCH will not use SegWit. Instead they are using their own brand of scaling technology.

We now have BTC and BCH competing as in “Will The Real Bitcoin Please Stand Up!” Egos and Big Money is on the line here.

Only time will tell but for sure, Segregated Witness (SEgWit) is activating tonight or tomorrow morning.

Now we will see if all of the hoopla surrounding SegWit is worth a can of beans.

Faith Sloan better known as "Queen Wiki" or "Crypto Queen" is a cryptocurrency enthusiast and trader. She has been a software engineer for 40 years and builds Decentralized Apps (DApps) on the Ethereum blockchain and plays with Tech toys. When she is not teaching, researching and writing about Cryptocurrencies, she's traveling the world and feeding her eating hobby.